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“The Self-Emptying God” A Sermon on Philippians 2:1-13

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SCRIPTURE READING: Philippians 2:1-13

“1 If, then, there is any comfort in Christ, any consolation from love, any partnership in the Spirit, any tender affection and sympathy,  2 make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. 3 Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. 4 Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others.  5 Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

6  who, though he existed in the form of God,

    did not regard equality with God

    as something to be grasped,

7  but emptied himself,

    taking the form of a slave,

    assuming human likeness.

    And being found in appearance as a human,

8      he humbled himself

    and became obedient to the point of death—

    even death on a cross.

9  Therefore God exalted him even more highly

    and gave him the name

    that is above every other name,

10  so that at the name given to Jesus

    every knee should bend,

    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

11  and every tongue should confess

    that Jesus Christ is Lord,

    to the glory of God the Father.

12 Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence but much more now in my absence, work on your own salvation with fear and trembling,  13 for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”

It’s good to be with you. I always love to preach here. You know me, and I know you. You love me, and I love you. What could go wrong?

As many of you know, I had a very bad fall the day before Easter almost six months ago. I fractured my skull in three places, and broke my neck in a couple places, And I put a big scare into my family, didn’t I? Yeah. I want to thank you all for the care, for your prayers, for the meal train, and for your love that surrounded me and my family these past months. My late mother would have said that my guardian angel was working overtime. I figure my room wasn’t ready. Anyway, here I am, and here you are, so let’s hear some good news.

Would you pray with me: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

When Brent invited me to guest preach today, he told me what the reading was and I shared with him that Philippians 2:1-13 is a foundational reading for my Christian faith. 

Now, Brent is not on vacation; he’s at the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ Annual Meeting, with John and Janet Canning, our delegates. And right about now he’s listening to The Rev. Dr. Senator Raphael Warnock preach. And you get to hear me. But Jimmy Carter told us long ago that life isn’t fair, so, you know. 

But anyway, Brent said this is the reading. And I thought, oh, that’s right in my wheelhouse.

Let me share a little background on the text, and then I will tell you why it is important for me. The whole reading is a series of encouragements from Paul to the church in Philippi, and admonitions about how to live the Christian life. He had founded this church in Philippi and had this very warm relationship with them. And the letter reflects this warmth and this sort of intimacy and love. He is writing to them from a Roman prison, but you wouldn’t know it from the tone of the letter. You’d think he’d just won the lottery. The church in Philippi had sent him a gift of money in prison by way of his friend Epaphroditus, who got there and gave him the money. And Paul sent this letter back to the church in Philippi with Epaphroditis. There was no postal system to speak of. (There actually was a postal system in the Roman Empire, but that’s neither here nor there.) But Epaphroditus brings this letter back, and we have the letter.

Embedded in the center of our passage is a poem, a beautiful poem about Christ, which most likely was a hymn that the Philippians would have known. Paul most likely did not write this hymn, but he’s quoting this hymn that they would have known.

You know how the words to hymns are sticky. You know what I’m talking about? You remember the words to hymns, but you don’t remember just texts from the Bible as well. Hymn texts are sticky. A good deal of what I know about the Christian faith I acquired from hymns, singing hymns in junior choir and senior choir. For example, there is more good Christology in “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” than in many a theological book. 

So this is a hymn. It’s a hymn about Christ’s humility, that though he was in human form he shared Divinity with God the Father. He did not consider it something to be exploited, or held on to, or grasped or gripped. But he gave it up. He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, even dying a slave’s death on the cross. And it has this form where it kind of goes down to his death on a cross, and then there’s a “therefore.” Therefore his name is highly exalted. It’s a wonderful, wonderful hymn. I know it by heart (not in this translation).

I’ll tell you why that hymn is salient for me. I grew up in the church. I sang in the Junior and then in the Senior Choir. My Sunday School faith was a pretty simple moralistic dualism. If you’re good God is happy, and if you are not good God is displeased. “He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.”

When I was 15 my mother became ill with colon cancer, and when I was 18, after many years of suffering, she died, two weeks into my first semester of college. To say I was lost would be an understatement, but my Sunday School faith didn’t have much to offer really, and I really didn’t want to have too much to do with this god who took my mom, or at least allowed her to be taken. I know she didn’t abandon me, but you feel abandoned when you’re a kid and your parent dies.

It’s a long story from there to here, and I will spare you the details, but when I ended up in seminary and started to really think deeply about who this God was, I was drawn to Jesus as the crucified and forsaken one. God incarnate in his human form who has solidarity with all of us humans in all our suffering, our sense of abandonment, our sense of forsakenness, all the marginal people, the last, the least, and the lost. That was a God I could embrace. I went to seminary looking for answers, and when someone asks me if I found them, I say, “Not really, but I got better questions.”

And so, the cross and all it means became a theological preoccupation of mine through most of my ministry. I’m kind of a “Johnny one note.” It’s a good note, an important note. And I had three academic sabbaticals in Britain with my family, in 1989 at Oxford University, in 1995 at St. Andrews University in Scotland, and 2001 at Cambridge University in England. And I studied the subject of the cross and what it means, and I wrote a book about it. The title of my book is “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross: Reflections on the Atonement.” That title comes from the Isaac Watts hymn we will sing after the sermon.

Isaac Watts, by the way, was a Congregationalist. I don’t know if you knew that. When I was a kid, I thought he was an Episcopalian, because it always said Isaac Watts in the Episcopal hymnbook. But no, he was one of us. His English Puritan church sang only the psalms in meter. They were good Calvinists, and were kind of suspicious of music and things like that, dangerous stuff like music. And one day as a teenager, he came out of worship and complained to his father that the music was boring. That music was really boring. His father, as fathers would do, said, “Well, do you think you can do better?” And 756 hymns later, the answer is “yes,” he could and he did! Some of our favorite hymns: “Joy to the World,”“ When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,”“ Our God Our Help in Ages Past, ”“I Sing the Mighty Power of God,”“ My Shepherd Will Supply My Need, ”just to name a few.

So the cross, for me, is the symbol of God in his human form in Jesus Christ, being God with us. God With Us, in the whole smear of human existence, the whole struggle of being a human being in this life. He shared our humanity in all its fullness.

I was born at the very end of the middle of the Twentieth Century, which was the bloodiest and most brutal century in human history, though, sadly, we are on pace to set a new record. I came of age during the time of the assassinations in our country of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. and the war in Vietnam. It was the cross that led me back to the Christian faith as a young adult. Only Christian faith with a cross at its center was adequate to make sense of these tragedies of my early adulthood, and the brokenness and brutality of life in this world.

While I was in seminary a very important book came out: Jurgen Moltmann’s “The Crucified God.” Jurgen Moltmann was a German Reformed theologian. I still remember a question from the Introduction, “What does it mean to recall the God who was crucified in a society whose official creed is optimism, and which is knee deep in blood?” Pretty good question, huh?

In 1990, I was honored to meet Moltmann, and to be on a panel with him in Princeton, at the Center of Theological Inquiry. He told his story of being a German teenager at the end of World War 2 when the Germans were running out of troops, and they started enlisting old men and young boys to fight what was left of the war. I think he was 16 when he was enlisted to man an anti-aircraft battery, and he told of watching his other young teenage boy comrades being maimed and dying around him. And then when the war was over, the Allies took him prisoner and he went to a prisoner of war camp in England, where some good Christian gave him a King James Bible, which he read from cover to cover, and had a conversion experience, which I guess that’s one way to call it. He concluded that only a crucified God could help him make sense of what his country had been involved in, make sense of the manifold brutalities of the war and the European Holocaust. He became a Christian and one of the finest theologians of his time.

Now, the theme of Paul’s letter to the Philippians is humility.  I just read an article in the Atlantic about how there have been 3 or 4 recent books assaulting humility and compassion. “We’ve got to get rid of that. We’ve got to stop taking care of people. You know, it’s the welfare state.” Popular books. No compassion, no empathy, no humility.

But for Paul, his model was Christ, the self-emptying of God in Christ. The Greek word for self-emptying is kenosis. It means “relinquishing,” “giving up”, “handing over,” “letting go.” Opening your hands. It is contrasted with “grasping,” “clinging,” “holding on,” “gripping.”

There is a wonderful contrast hidden in plain sight in this little hymn in Philippians: Adam — did you know Adam is not a proper name, it means “human” in Hebrew. Adam, the first human – any grasping in that story? What did Adam grasp? The fruit. It wasn’t an apple. Apples don’t grow in the Middle East. It could have been a date or pomegranate. But it was a fruit, and he grasped it. Christ in the New Testament is often contrasted with Adam. Adam, the first human, and then Christ is the new human. So Adam, humans in our natural state are grasping, whereas Christ, the new Adam, the new human, isn’t grasping, but relinquishing, emptying, humble.

So, Paul’s admonitions to the Philippians are based on Christ’s humility. I need to say a word about humility in the ancient world. There are many lists of virtues in the New Testament that echo similar lists of virtues in pagan writings of the time. They are what we might expect: courage, honesty, strength, and the like. But notable in its absence is humility. It is hard for us to realize how radical the Gospel message of humility was at the time. A crucified messiah was on nobody’s bingo card. That Jesus chose humility, taking the form of a slave, even dying a slave’s death on a cross, was a scandal then, and it’s still a scandal.

Humility was not a virtue. The word virtue derives from the Latin “vir,” which means male. To be virtuous was to be manly. Humility was not considered a manly virtue. We men have a lot to answer for, really. But Jesus freely chose to humble himself and be an atoning sacrifice for the whole world. Somebody should tell hyper-Christian Pete Hegseth to have a closer reading of the Gospels as he touts his manly warrior-ethic version of Christianity. Perhaps he should start with the Letter to the Philippians. Or the Sermon on the Mount. Or the “Golden Rule.”

As some of you know, I am part of a wonderful Zoom Bible study that meets every Wednesday at 1:00. You are welcome to join us! The link is on our church website. Our group this week was a great help to me on Wednesday when I asked them what might this passage means for us as Christians today.

One person said that what Paul is describing here is exactly the opposite of the world we live in. Humility is still radical and still a scandal. Grasping, on the other hand, is widely accepted as the way to get ahead in our society. Rugged individualism is the American way, whereas Paul believes that faith is a team sport and takes place in community. Does anybody know where the Bible says, “God helps those who help themselves?” No. It’s not in the Bible. Who knows where that came from? How about ambition, competition, anything goes, dog eat dog. None of that is here. Paul, rather, admonishes them: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others.” Do we see a lot of that in our leaders and “successful” people? Do we see it in celebrities and famous people? Maybe Dolly Parton… Does the world we live in reflect the humility that Paul describes?

The late writer David Foster Wallace gave a now famous commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005. He told this story: “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”” Fish don’t see the water they swim in and we don’t see the socially-constructed world we take for granted, with all its assumptions about the way things are, and who’s in and who’s out, and who’s worthy and who’s not worthy, and who’s cool and who’s not cool. 

The people in Jesus’s day didn’t see the water they swam in either, which was the occupation of the Roman Empire, the most powerful empire in the history of the world at that time, which they kept in power in collaboration with the religious authorities in power. Power was maintained by violence and the threat of violence. Crucifixion was a slave’s death, reserved for those who threatened the power of Rome. One of the reasons the four Gospels are reticent about talking about Jesus’s crucifixion — this wasn’t Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ” which goes into agonizing ongoing details of the death of Jesus. They were reticent about any details. And why do you think that is? Because everyone had seen a crucifixion. They knew what it was like. They didn’t need to be told. When there was a slave revolt the Romans would line the streets with dead and dying men hanging on crosses, sometimes thousands of them. It was a warning. It was “See that? You mess with Rome’s power and that’s what you end up with.”

Jesus’s death was a state execution. Does that happen today in our world? Sadly, it does. The extra- judicial killings of people in the Caribbean in small boats who may or may not be drug dealers, but we’ll never know because they don’t get due process, they don’t get their day in court. The administration decides they don’t like them, so they kill them. Or what we saw on TV, the murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti  by ICE authorities in Minneapolis. Which we saw. We saw the video.

The alternative realm that Jesus proclaimed and embodied, that he called the kingdom of God, was a threat to those in power, and so they murdered him. And that was that.

Except it wasn’t! Because he didn’t stay dead, and his followers turned the world upside down by seeking a new world, seeking a better way, living a better way, a way of compassion, of empathy, of love, kindness and humility.

So, here’s Paul, moldering in a Roman prison writing to the church in Philippi, admonishing them to be loving as Jesus loved, and humble as Jesus was humble. Was this new way easy? No, it was not easy. Philippi was the capitol of Greek Macedonia and many Roman soldiers retired there. It was like the Berkshires, you know? So, the church was surrounded by fellow citizens who had sworn an oath to Caesar as Lord. The Greek is “kyrios,” the same word that Christians used to talk about Jesus. Jesus is Lord. So, there’s a conflict in values and culture. There was social tension and occasionally outbreaks of persecution for these Christians.

Still, Paul encourages them. He says, “Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence but much more now in my absence, work on your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”

Now, I have always been a bit intimidated by the phrase “work on your own salvation with fear and trembling,” but Paul softens it a little bit by saying “it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” I really like how the Message paraphrases these two verses: “What I’m getting at, friends, is that you should simply keep on doing what you’ve done from the beginning. When I was living among you, you lived in responsive obedience. Now that I’m separated from you, keep it up. Better yet, redouble your efforts. Be energetic in your life of salvation, reverent and sensitive before God. That energy is God’s energy, an energy deep within you, God himself willing and working at what will give him the most pleasure.” I like that energy, that vitality.

So imitating Christ should not scare us, it should not frighten us. It’s not the same as impersonating him. There is only one Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word of God. Only one. His humility is the model for Christian humility. But we can imitate his humility. The way of Christ does not mean pulling yourself up by your spiritual bootstraps. It means walking together in community into the new and better way that Christ has begun among us. It means recognizing the water we swim in. It may mean changing the water we swim in. It means rejecting the fear that divides us and warns us off challenging unjust power and evil.

And the best Good News for today is that you are already in Christ by virtue of your baptism, and by your participation in the church, which is Christ’s body. You’re already in. Here you are, God’s beloved, worshipping and being the church by your very presence. So, just be who you already are! Love God, love your neighbor. And as Paul wrote to the little flock in Philippi, so long ago, “Be energetic in your life of salvation, reverent and sensitive before God. That energy is God’s energy, an energy deep within you, God himself willing and working at what will give him the most pleasure.” Amen.

“I preached this sermon on September 27, 2026 at the First Congregational Church of Stockbridge (UCC), Massachusetts. For the YouTube video go here: https://stockbridgeucc.org/sermons/the-self-emptying-god/?fbclid=IwY2xjawU0oZRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBwZG9mAXNydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR7PxH_0Nswq_aI-7G2Pz34PJl3HAFU7kyzWvpCmBErhTRuvR9bz1Q9MPdjpoQ_aem_9lV7HZDh2WsRXvhYPzuEZQ)

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“Breathe on Me, Breath of God” A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Lent

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I want to thank you for inviting me to preach in this faithful, historic church. I have known this church since my Andover Newton days more than half a century ago, and I have known and admired several of your former pastors. You are a flourishing congregation with lively engaging worship. I often livestream your services. In Rebecca and Martha, you have two gifted, faithful preachers and worship leaders. I love your music. You are richly blessed and I give thanks for you,

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Shrimp Pad Thai

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Shrimp Pad Thai

 

 

This Pad Thai is relatively easy stir-fry to make, but it requires a bit of time for chopping and prep.

Ingredients

 

12 oz wide rice sticks

3 TBS peanut Oil

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped or put through a garlic press

4 scallions cut in 2 in. pieces

½ TBS finely chopped fresh ginger

1 lb. large shrimp, shelled and deveined

2 Eggs, beaten

4 oz snow peas

½ sliced red bell pepper

1 cup bean sprouts, rinsed and drained

½ cup chopped roasted peanuts (for garnish)

½ cup of chopped cilantro (for garnish)

Lime wedges (for serving)

Red pepper flakes to taste (optional)

 

Sauce

1 TBS fish sauce

1 TBS tamarind paste

1 TBS Chinese cooking wine or dry sherry

 

Recipe

 

Place the rice sticks in a large bowl and cover with hot tap water for 30 minutes. Chop the garlic, scallions and ginger and place on a small plate and set aside. Slice the bell pepper and set aside. Bring a small pot of water to a boil, poach the snow peas for one minute, drain and spray with cold water. Set aside. Beat the eggs and set aside.

In a small bowl mix the fish sauce, tamarind paste, and cooking wine and set aside.

You may use a wok, but I prefer to use my 12 in. stainless-steel skillet. Heat oil in the pan over medium high heat. When the oil is hot, toss in the ginger, garlic and scallions and stir fry for 30 seconds. Toss in the red pepper. Toss in the shrimp and stir-fry until pink, about 3 minutes. Stir in the sauce and mix well. Reduce heat to medium low and add the drained rice noodles and toss and fold them into the pan. Repeat with the drained bean sprouts. Keep stir-frying for several minutes until everything is coated with the sauce and is hot. Turn the Pad Thai into a warm serving dish and top with the peanuts and cilantro. Serve with lime wedges. An Alsatian Riesling or an Asian beer would go nicely with it.

 

 

 

 

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The Ten Most Popular Posts in 2025

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These ten were the top visited posts and pages in 2025. None of them were written this year, and most of them are sermons from the archives. Although I am posting less frequently these days, the old stuff remains much visited. The Ferlinghetti poem had an impressive 20, 774 hits. If you read it you will know why it is a poem for our time.

Just a friendly reminder that this is an open-source free site, and you are free to share content with attribution. But remember “Thou shalt not steal!” I appreciate your support. Thanks for coming by and come again in 2026. (Photo: Tierney Wildlife Refuge in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. © R.L. Floyd)

“Pity the Nation” A Poem for our Time by Lawrence Ferlinghetti  

Why did Jesus refer to Herod as “That fox” in Luke 13:32”?  

“Distracted by Many Things” A Sermon on Luke 10:38-42  

“Breaking chains, Opening Doors” A Sermon on Acts 16:16-34    

“Ask, Search, Knock.” A Sermon on Luke 11: 1-13

“The God who Still Speaks” A Sermon on John 16

“Building Bigger Barns” A Sermon on Luke 13-21

“Growing Up” A Sermon on Galatians 3: 23-29

“The Healing Touch” A Sermon on Mark 1: 40-45

“Of Fig Trees and Second Chances” A Sermon on Luke 13:6-9

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I Was Ordained Fifty Years Ago Today

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On this day fifty years ago, September 21, 1975, I was ordained into the Christian Ministry of Word and Sacrament at the Newton Highlands Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, in Newton Highlands, Massachusetts. I was 26.

I had had my ecclesiastical council weeks before and waited for a call for a church before I could be ordained. Late in the summer it came. I was called to be the pastor of the Congregational Churches of Limerick and West Newfield, a “Two-point charge” serving two small congregations nine miles apart in the Northwest corner of York County, Maine. I had preached my neutral pulpit sermon in nearby Fryeburg, and a candidating sermon in each of the two churches.

I remember my ordination vividly. The church secretary, Irene Fultz, had designed. printed and mailed out the invitations. My family was there. My Associate Conference Minister, Oliver Powell, was there. The Reverend Joanne Hartunian, represented the Metropolitan Boston Association. The Reverend Meredith (Jerry) B. Handspicker, presided over the Laying on of Hands, and gave the Prayer of Ordination (after the ordained ministers were assembled he invited the whole congregation to participate, the first time I had seen this. It is commonplace now in the UCC.) The Reverend Walter Telfer, Director of Field Education, gave a Charge to the Congregation. The Reverend Michael J. Maguire led the congregation in a prayer of Confession. I presided at Holy Communion and gave the Benediction for the first time. The Reverend Dudne M. Breeze, our pastor, gave the sermon. He admonished me to be a Minister of the Word of God. I now know how wise that counsel was and how hard it would be.

I served those two little churches for four years and have never been happier. I married Martha while there and those churches threw us a big party. I trained as an EMT and became a firefighter.

Next, we went to Bangor, where I was Chaplain at Bangor Theological Seminary and Associate Pastor of the Hammond Street Church, United Church of Christ. There I ministered to students and congregants. I was a founder of Maine Clergy and Laity Concerned (CALC) a national anti-war organization. I chaired the Social Justice Committee of the Maine Council of Churches.

Finally, I came to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1982 to be the Pastor of the First Church of Christ in Pittsfield. I had three sabbaticals from there: Oxford (1989), St Andrews (1995) and Cambridge (2000). I studied and wrote articles and books while on those wonderful respites from active ministry.

I stayed in Pittsfield for twenty-two years and would have stayed longer if I hadn’t sustained a traumatic brain injury (TBI) in a bicycle accident and had to retire early on disability. That crash was exactly 25 years ago and equally divides my ministry into before and after my disability.

I eventually discovered a new chapter in my life. I started writing. I wrote hymns. I started this blog, I wrote devotions for the United Church of Christ’s Daily Devotional, and I found a new ministry of the Word in my words. I became active in the First Congregational Church of Stockbridge.

So, there you have it. Here I am 50 years later. I once kept count of how many weddings I officiated at, but I have lost count well into several hundred. The same for baptisms, confirmations. I can’t count the hospital visits, the funerals and graveside committals I was part of. I’ve held people’s hands in Rehab Facilities and Psychiatric Wards. I’ve put my arms around people in overwhelming grief. I’ve been humbled by theses encounters.

I have heard numerous confessions. I have listened to more kinds of human consternation and misery than you can imagine. I have also been privileged to be part of people’s lives at some of their more poignant moments. I have shared many joys and sorrows. I have “wept with those who weep, and rejoiced with those who have rejoiced.” (Romans 12:15)

I have led countless Bible Studies and other courses for adults. I have authored “A Course in Basic Christianity” for adults. I think of it as a course to teach you “everything you should have learned in Confirmation Class, but probably didn’t because you had your mind on other things.”

I’ve valued the relationships of my clergy friends and colleagues in the United Church of Christ and other Christian denominations. I served  the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ as their representative to the Massachusetts Commission on Christian Unity for twelve years. There, I made many friends and came to appreciate the richness of the “Great Church” of Jesus Christ.

I have also treasured the relationships I have had with my Jewish brothers and sisters in the clergy. We have become trusted friends and interlocators, and in that safe space of friendship have had rich and deep conversations about both what unites and divides us. It was a great honor that the family of my dear friend Rabbi Harold Salzmann asked me to speak at his funeral at Temple Anshe Amunin in Pittsfield.

I’ve witnessed people’s lives changed by their confrontation with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And I, myself, have been profoundly changed by a life-long engagement with Jesus and his Gospel of freedom and grace. Jesus is still the most interesting and engaging part of our faith, and after fifty years he is still the one with whom I have to deal in thought and deed and prayer.

I have struggled to be faithful to the truth as I have known it. My reach has exceeded my grasp. I have pondered the deep things of the faith and have written countless articles, papers, and three and a half books. I have spent years trying to reform my denomination and restore its historic theological and ecumenical vision through leadership in such activities as the Confessing Christ movement, the Mercersburg Society, and the Craigville Colloquies.

I have also, to be quite honest, been a leader throughout my fifty year ministry, in an enterprise that is in decline in institutional vigor and societal esteem. The schools where I received my masters and my doctorate are no longer there. The mainline church in whose rocky vineyard I have labored is smaller, poorer, and less respected than it was before I began. My last church, where I served for 22 years,  sold its grand gothic meeting house to another congregation, and merged with a nearby UCC church.

But I do not despair about this. God will not be left without witnesses. The church of the future, I believe, will be smaller, leaner, and more faithful. People won’t go because it’s “the thing to do” as it once was.

They’ll go because they have found something of great value to which they are committed. Or they will go because they are searching for something important that seems missing in their lives, something more durable, something deeper than the shallow seductions and distractions of our consumer culture that values having more than being.

And society needs the church to model a community that welcomes and values all of God’s children. A space where love is stronger than hate, faith stronger than fear, and kindness and compassion are shown to the vulnerable among us, which is all of us.

So, while I have regrets about my failings and limitations as a minister, I have none about choosing this calling and living it out for five decades. My daughter has chosen to be a pastor, and I watch with awe at how gifted and faithful she is. It is young clergy such as she who give me much hope for the church of the future. I thank God for sustaining me through this long calling, and for calling me in the first place despite my manifold frailties and failures. To God be the glory.

“Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.” Amen. —Ephesians 3:20-21.

(This morning in worship, The First Congregational Church of Stockbridge blessed me by prayer and the laying on of hands. A livestream of the service is available on the church’s website.)

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Guided by the Spirit. A Sermon on Galatians 5: 1, 13-25

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“For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become enslaved to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another. Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. Now the works of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.” (Galatians 5:1, 13-25)

Prayer: May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts, be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

”There’s a sweet, sweet Spirit in this place, and I know that it’s the Spirit of the Lord.“ I want to thank Sean for picking that good old hymn and getting us started on our Spirit-filled worship. We had quite a Spirit-filled Pentecost three weeks ago, didn’t we?  with streamers floating above our heads and everyone dressed in red. But it’s still Pentecost, which is a season and not just a day, a season to explore with some of the implications of being a Spirit-filled people. More particularly I want to explore with you the idea of being guided by the Spirit in our lives. Continue reading →

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“Moved to Compassion” A Sermon on Luke 7:1-17

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“After Jesus had finished all his sayings in the hearing of the people, he entered Capernaum. A centurion there had a slave whom he valued highly and who was ill and close to death. When he heard about Jesus, he sent some Jewish elders to him, asking him to come and heal his slave. When they came to Jesus, they appealed to him earnestly, saying, “He is worthy to have you do this for him, for he loves our people, and it is he who built our synagogue for us.” And Jesus went with them, but when he was not far from the house, the centurion sent friends to say to him, “Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; therefore, I did not presume to come to you. But only speak the word, and let my servant be healed. For I also am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me, and I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and the slave does it.” When Jesus heard this he was amazed at him, and, turning to the crowd following him, he said, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.” When those who had been sent returned to the house, they found the slave in good health.

Soon afterward he went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. As he approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow, and with her was a large crowd from the town. When the Lord saw her, he was moved with compassion for her and said to her, “Do not cry.” Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stopped. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, rise!” The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized all of them, and they glorified God, saying, “A great prophet has risen among us!” and “God has visited his people!” This word about him spread throughout the whole of Judea and all the surrounding region. (Luke 7: 1-17)

What makes you cry? What moves you? I may have been an emotional person before I suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury 25 years ago, but I certainly am one now. I get choked up, sometimes even when I’m preaching. If that happens this morning, don’t be concerned. It won’t bother me and it shouldn’t bother you. My TBI makes me “emotionally labile,” but you needn’t have a head injury to be moved to tears. I’m just an extreme case, a literal “head case.” There’s even a word for it: “Tearful or given to weeping.” It is called “lachrymose” from the Latin for “weeping.” Lachrymose: isn’t that a cool word?

There are certain texts or songs that move me to tears. Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech gets me every time. I weep through John 1 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”

Some of the music that chokes me up is about weeping itself, as in the St. Matthew’s Passion. When Peter weeps after betraying Jesus: “Just then the cock crew. Then Peter remembered the words of Jesus, when he said to him: “Before the cock crows, you will deny me three times.” And Peter went out and wept bitterly. It’s even more poignant in the German: “bitterlich.”

Or the aptly named “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem. “Full of tears will be that day; When from the ashes shall arise. The guilty man to be judged.” I’ve sung that twice now with Berkshire Lyric at Ozawa Hall and I had to really bear down to get through it both times. Also, the music is really beautiful. Which doesn’t help.

So, I’ve always believed one should pay close attention to these choked-up moments in your life because they mean something important. They mean that something authentic has moved you deeply in your soul.

That is what is going on in our stories today. We have two stories from Luke where Jesus is deeply moved by the suffering of others. He is moved by the centurion’s faith, and he is moved by the grieving widow in Nain, whose only son has died.

Our theme for this morning is compassion, which Jesus both practices and embodies. In telling the story of Jesus, a generation or more after Jesus’s death, Luke is trying to teach the church what God is like, and therefore, what God’s people should be like, a community of compassion.

Remember how Luke describes Jesus reading the Isaiah scroll in his home synagogue in Nazareth. He read:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me

to bring good news to the poor.”

That was Jesus’s calling: To bring good news to the poor. So, who are the poor? The poor are those who suffer. They may be wealthy or impoverished, but in their suffering they are poor.

In our first story the Roman centurion fears for the life of a favorite slave. In Luke’s view of the Gospel’s inclusivity, even a hated Roman enemy is not outside the scope of Jesus’s love and attention. The centurion is not literally poor, for he is a powerful soldier with authority over a hundred men, but he is poor in his need. His slave is dying and he heard about Jesus and believes Jesus can heal him. Jesus is “amazed” by his faith and heals the slave.

I want to say something about the Greek word translated here as compassion. Compassion literally means “suffering with.” The Greek word here translated as “compassion,” is splagchnizomai (that’s easy for me to say!) It comes from splagchna, which means “intestines; guts.” Jesus’s reaction to the widow’s plight is literally visceral, gut wrenching, brought on by empathy for a mother who lost her child, one of the most difficult of all human experiences.

Jesus also knows that having lost her only son as well as her husband, she is now doubly vulnerable. For in the patriarchal world of the first-century Roman Empire, widows were solely dependent on their male relatives for sustenance and safety. Here is compassion, suffering with the sufferer.

Now Luke’s Gospel describes many acts of compassion by Jesus, but he only uses this particular long hard-to-pronounce word for compassion three times, and the other two are some of your favorite stories that are found only in Luke. Can you guess what they might be? What comes to mind?

First, there is the story of the good Samaritan, who had compassion on the man beaten by brigands and left by the side of the road to die. We see Luke’s universality there, too, since the Samaritan is a hated enemy, who shows mercy after the official representatives of the religious establishment passed by on the other side of the road.

The other example is the story of the waiting father and his two sons. The father sees the lost prodigal from far off and has compassion for him.

So, likewise, Jesus is moved to compassion for the widow. Picture with me these two processions that meet outside the city gate in the village of Nain. One is a procession of death, with the dead son on a stretcher, his bereaved mother, and a great crowd of mourners headed to the graveyard.

The other is a procession of life, with Jesus, his disciples, and a great crowd of exuberant followers. The two processions collide, and the procession of life wins. Jesus raises the dead son from death to life, the first time he does this.

Why does Luke place this here in his story? Soon, in Luke 7:22, Jesus will tell John the Baptist’s disciples to report back to John that they have seen and heard miraculous signs and wonders, including the raising of the dead

The Good News that Jesus brings means the leveling of established positions and privilege. My teacher and friend, Max Stackhouse, went to India for a year with his family, where Max was a guest professor at United Theological Seminary in Bangalore. It was a life-changing experience for Max, who came to view the Indian caste system as a great systemic evil.

He told me how the Good News of Jesus was powerfully attractive to the lowest castes in India. Christians make up only 2.3% of the population, and many of them had been Dalits, whom we once labeled “Untouchables.”

Jesus comes with good news for the poor, the last, the least and the lost of society. He touches the Untouchables. And he comes with good news for us, the privileged, who are also poor in our own ways.

Henri Nouwen once described Jesus’ life of compassion as the “path of downward mobility.” Jesus chooses suffering, rejection, and death rather than the path of “upward mobility” toward privilege and power.

Jesus didn’t reach down and lift the poor up from above. He became poor “he suffered with” and according to Luke, it was this very suffering that led him to the cross, “for us and all people.” Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection are what enables redemption, atonement, indeed, relief from suffering for all humanity.

Jesus’ “path of downward mobility” differs from the idea today that compassion means helping “those less fortunate than we are.”

One of the things I truly love about the Cathedral of the Beloved is the way the leaders erase the distinction between the helpers and the help-ees. Sure, we prepare a meal to serve, but we all eat it together in a community. The Food Program at United Church of Christ, Pittsfield, does the same thing; you can’t tell whose is there for food or there to volunteer. Sometimes those groups overlap. And this gives everyone dignity and erases the stigma.

In Jesus we see this important distinction between compassion and pity. Jesus knows you can’t love down, from a place above or apart. Even some of the terms we use, such as “the underprivileged,” or the “less fortunate” keep us above those we serve, who like us, are beloved children of God.

Real compassion, as embodied by Jesus, runs counter to our culture’s constant call for success, achievement and wealth. Real compassion is a call to suffer with the powerless.

A Christian faith true to the life and teachings of Jesus should never seek to be powerful and rise above others. That is why I have condemned Christian Nationalism, and the popular and rich preachers of the Prosperity Gospel as being false to what Jesus stood for.

We are not in a society that honors or displays much compassion. This very week the richest man in the world cut aid, food, and medicine, to the poorest people on earth, some of whom will now die. We daily see new polices that are the opposite of compassion, they are cruel and mean and go to the heart of who we are as a country. And in my opinion, the cruelty is not a bug, but a feature. It’s the point. The obscene worship of wealth and power is directly opposite of what Jesus taught and who he was.

There has been some push-back from the Christian Church. We’ve seen a brave Episcopal bishop, Marianne Budde, gently entreat the President to have mercy on the scared and vulnerable. The Roman Catholic church has declared the war on immigrants to be incompatible with Catholic Social Teaching. The Presiding Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Elizabeth Eaton, has spoken out about misinformation on social media about her church’s funding when General Flynn tweeted that the Lutheran Church was “a money-laundering scheme.” Our own United Church of Christ has spoken out, and there is an Immigration Support Meeting  today at 2:30.

So, what can we do? I have two suggestions. First, I suggest we partner with any groups on the ground who are working to implement compassion for those who are suffering. Our UCC Conference has lists of organizations that are helping immigrants.

Secondly, let us continue to be a laboratory of the compassionate community. Let us continue to live out the radical inclusivity that Jesus taught and embodied. Let is continue to be faithful to our covenant, and to being “Open and Affirming” to all people. Let us pray with and for each other and support each other. Let us tell the truth in love, and not give in to our fears. Let us reach out to those in our communities that are being harmed.

Finally, let us be faithful followers of Jesus Christ, our Risen Lord and Savior. We may not be the powerful of society, but we are not powerless. There is a different kind of power available to us through him who loved us. For I am convinced that nothing will separate us from the love of God, not life or death, not oligarchs and autocrats. Nothing will separate us from the of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.  And the truth of that moves me deeply and chokes me up! Amen.

(I preached this sermon on February 9, 2025 at the First Congregational Church at Stockbridge, Massachusetts. A YouTube video of the service is here:)

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Roast Rosemary Pork Tenderloin with Raspberry Sauce

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Pork

My granddaughter celebrated her eighth birthday right before Christmas, and we asked her if she had any requests for her birthday dinner. She said, “I want Bompas’ (that’s me) pork tenderloin!” Somewhere she was served a memorable one with raspberry sauce, and I’ve tried to reproduce it for her several times with varying critical responses. She deemed this one pretty good, so I will share it with you. Continue reading →